


An Old Love Story

by SullustanGin



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends: The Old Republic (Video Game)
Genre: Backstory, Dysfunctional Relationships, F/M, Fluff, Growing Old Together, Home Movies, Older Man/Younger Woman, parents of character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-15
Updated: 2021-03-15
Packaged: 2021-03-24 03:35:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30066066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SullustanGin/pseuds/SullustanGin
Summary: The Smuggler discovers something in her ship's hold from over 30 years before.  It's older than most of the people, institutions, and relationships she knows about.But not all.
Relationships: Gault Rennow/Hylo Visz, background Theron Shan/Smuggler
Kudos: 1





	An Old Love Story

**Author's Note:**

> It's a canon pairing, but not a lot has been written about the whole Hylo/Gault relationship. I wrote this as part of a Fluffy February tag, but since most of my stories revolve around other pairings, I'm pulling this unique one out. I'm leaving this one outside the main realm of my fic series because honestly, it's more about Gault and Hylo than it is my favorite spy and smuggler. You can read this with no other references. 
> 
> Timeline: Currently post 6.2 (c. early 3626 BBY, 26 ATC; Holovid date is 3660 BBY, 7 BTC)

“How can you forget you have an entire hold?” Theron asked, staring down into the darkness.

“She’s bigger than she looks!” came the reply in protest. “The _Thief_ is also older than all of us minus Bowie, so a lady has some secrets.” 

“Didn’t your parents use it?” 

“Yeah, but apparently not since I was a little kid. Holy space harpies, there’s surplus from the Great Galactic War in here.” Eva poked her head up, grabbing another light stick to stick to the wall while she worked.

“That stuff must be 30 years old. Any of it still good?” Theron craned his neck to keep an eye on his wife’s white shirt as it went further into the unlit hold. He crouched down and activated a light stick so he could see immediately in below him.

There wasn’t any dust – the seal had been air tight – but there was a lingering odor of stale, expensive cigarettes (Hadrian) and floral shampoo (Athene) that occasionally made appearances on the ship, even though the people in question had been dead for 20 years at this point. It was like having friendly residential ghosts, if such things existed. 

“I’m gonna say that we probably don’t want the rations, unless we want to haze newcomers,” Eva gaily replied. “If they haven’t dried out, the raingear might still work. Oh, thanks Ma and Dad – we have alcohol!”

Theron rolled his eyes. “Every hatch on this ship has something squirreled away for a fun weekend, I swear to the stars.” 

After a minute of Eva prying a crate open, there were a few moments of hearing nothing but her breathing. “Eva?”

“I didn’t expect to find any more of these.” Eva’s free hand reached for Theron’s, and he easily pulled her up out of the long-forgotten hold. 

In her other hand was a holovid case.

**

Theron nudged Eva as their first mark entered the cantina. She nodded, then gestured at the second. 

Home HoloVid Night had long become an Odessen tradition over the last five years. It started with a sergeant who had been on Yavin and he’d caught some footage of the party the crew of _Virtue’s Thief_ had thrown after the end of the Revanite campaign. Eva, Theron, and Lana had never seen the footage before, so it was equal parts excruciating and hilarious to watch. What hooked most people is that one never knew where new friends on Odessen would turn out to be people they’d met before. Hell, there was one vid found of two childhood friends from some random beach planet somewhere who later were serving in the speeder pool together. The galaxy was smaller than anyone thought.

The holo started up – silent. “Oh, it’s Captain Corolastor’s – holocam’s sound is broken.”

One of the corporals – nobody remembered what side he’d been on before the Alliance and it didn’t matter -- struck up a tune on a repaired piano that had been hauled into the cantina. 

As the pianist improvised, unfamiliar figures paraded across the screen. There was some general mumbling and murmuring until Athene Corolastor came on the screen. A cheer went up from the young male enlisted. She’d become a Home Holovid favorite. Thin with gloriously red deep copper hair, she almost seemed out of place on the smuggler ship – which was ironic, because she was the boss of the entire place. Eva had to admit her mother looked more like some ethereal creature from a fantasy novel than she did a smuggler.

Then her husband hit the screen, and there was a dejected, “Hi, Hadrian” from the same crowd, followed shortly by a cheer from the female enlisted. If there was ever someone who looked the role of the smuggler, the dark-haired, rangy man with the rather impressive mustache and mutton chops was it. 

A very small Eva was greeted by both camps as one would a little cousin they hadn’t seen in awhile. The Holovid was of an old smuggler party – Eva was young, barely past toddling. Hadrian hadn’t been injured seriously yet, so he was able to partake in all of the dumb things smugglers did at parties when they were bored. At one point, he pointed at the person holding the camera, and said something, mustache quirking the entire time, before the camera was flipped around---

A gasp went up as a younger Gault – Tyresius at that time – directed the camera at himself. He was in his mid-thirties at that point, and still had both his horns. He gave the holocam a cheeky grin, then he angled it down slightly to catch sight of his pretty young girlfriend at the time -- Hylo. She was clearly much younger than he was, even then – early twenties. “Oh stars.” The woman who had gasped was Hylo herself. Theron and Eva watched from their perches as she sat up slightly, hand to her mouth. 

(Eva became the Voidhound at the same age Hylo had broken the Mandalorian Blockade. For Eva, that had been an accomplishment…until she met the woman after the sour fallout of that triumph.)

The holocam switched hands, and it seemed like it became the Gault and Hylo Show. Other people – strangers to everyone but Eva (and maybe Hylo and Gault, if they remembered) – meandered in and out of the footage. This particular holovid seemed to come back around to the Devavronian and the Miralan, every time. The front row gallery took notice.

“Goddamn, Hylo was a fox.”

“Still is!”

Theron nudged Eva. Gault hadn’t moved from his chair. He watched scenes of his old life as Tyresius flow past the screen. It struck Eva suddenly that Gault was 70 now – twice the age he had been in these shots. And Hylo – Hylo’s time in stasis had meant she was now in her mid-forties, nearly doubling the original age gap between her and Gault. 

(The age gap between Theron and Eva was much smaller, but the smuggler and spy had taken into account the impact of a lost five years and a new total of eight years’ difference for two careers whose participants rarely lived to 40. Theron had crossed that threshold his last birthday.)

The pair danced and talked. Hylo even had some screen time with Athene and her small child – Eva didn’t remember the conversation. 

Finally, there was a cake cutting scene – there was a bunch of Imp ship decorations dotted across a hastily made rectangular cake and then an obnoxiously large model of Hylo’s ship slapped on top. “I’d just done the run – broke the blockade. Hell, I hadn’t even been paid yet, and we had a party.” Hylo watched as she got the first piece of cake, then smashed the second into Gault’s face, laughing the entire time. 

Toward the end of the show, there was scene of Gault slumped back in his chair, asleep, the sugar and alcohol crash getting to him. Much like cats, small children are inexorably drawn to large warm spaces to sleep on, and Eva was no different. “Hey, Hylo, remember that one time you caught Gault sleeping with a younger woman?”

There was a beat of silence before Hylo burst out laughing, hard, as her younger counterpart came onto the screen, teasing Gault awake likely with that exact joke, based upon the lipread; he startled awake with a confused expression on his face, which was followed up with momentary horror, the relief when he realized that the ‘younger woman’ was a toddler up past her bedtime. “And it was the only time, thank you very much,” Gault yelled back at Eva. The entire cantina was roaring with laughter at this point. 

As the holofilm continued, Theron and Eva watched as the real Gault leaned over to the real Hylo and whispered to her about something. “For all his failings, I don’t think chasing skirts when he was with her was one of them,” Theron whispered to Eva.

“I don’t think he’d be dumb enough; he’d get a blaster to the face.”

“I don’t think he had the heart for it, strangely.”

Eva hesitated a moment before grudgingly agreeing. “It wasn’t a question about loving or wanting someone else – it was love of the game, love of the money that got him.” She leaned her head on Theron’s shoulder, and his arm snaked around her waist.

The pair watched Hylo and Gault talk as the holo finished.

“Didn’t expect that to be on there.” That was Eva’s final comment on the film as she stretched her arms behind her head as she sat at the back of the cantina next to Theron. As she eased out of the stretch, she let herself settle into his side, his arm still slung around her as they watched Hylo and Gaunt talk, words unheard, as the rest of the audience filed out, joking and laughing. 

“Hell of a time to find it – you know they were on the outs again?” Theron asked. Eva hummed in the negative. “Gault’s been trading around some of our excess supplies – apparently, Hylo had clinched a deal with the Old Tion Brotherhood, only to find out he’d traded away the lynchpin products in question – the slicer guides.”

“Same man, same problems,” Eva murmured quietly. “It won’t change.” Eva sighed. “But I don’t know if there’s anyone else out there that gets either one of them like the other does.” 

Theron looked over at the other couple left in the room before standing up, Eva rising with him. “And that covers a lot of ground, no matter how rocky.”

Husband and wife left the cantina, the lights still on, as one old love story played out again, and would do so for as long as both participants were out of stasis and alive. 

**Author's Note:**

> Canonically, shortly after Hylo broke the Mandalorian blockade on Coruscant, she was celebrated as a hero of the Republic and she made more credits than most smugglers could dream of. This is the after party.
> 
> Sometime after this was filmed, Gault ran off with the loot, leaving Hylo in debt and in trouble. We learn in the BH story that Hylo's way out of it was to be put in stasis for over 15 years (she was already out of the picture by the Treaty of Coruscant in 3653 BBY), only to be brought back by Gault himself. They've been on and off again since, but it's still an association that's around 40 years old by this stage, depending on how old we think Hylo is (born before 3681, but how long before?). They keep coming back to each other.


End file.
